2015: Year Of The Manifesto, The Rant, and The Screed Update

The year-long art installation project 2015: Year of The Manifesto, The Rant, and The Screed is off to a great start and it’s not even New Year’s Eve yet! I’ve set up the initial display in my window the outer walkway area of StudioLab (located on the 5th floor of the Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago) to include a small collection of books that inspire the project and offer some cultural context for it.

This project will change and mutate on a regular basis and while the initial presentation is a bit more on the educational side (especially the books and the early writings to give context) I do plan to dive into a great many of my own manifesto, rant and screed writings which are all custom made for the installation as I go.

I’ve even got some time set aside to do a “rants on vinyl” section to showcase some crazy LPs I’ve discovered along the way, and sometime in 2015 I plan to explore something I call “visual rants” and the notion of a visual manifesto that is communicated in pictures rather than words.

This entire year-long project is inspired, informed, and even promoted by zines, indie publishers, etc. A lot of the visual style is informed by roadside panhandlers and religious zealots with their hand-lettered signs and placards. Still more inspiration comes from the ravings of conspiracy nuts and religious extremists of all types.

My goal in using this style is twofold—I find my own handwriting to share similar qualities with these people (for better or worse) and I’m hoping to refine my style a bit through a LOT of daily handwriting. Secondly, I’m not setting out to make fun of anyone, but I have long found myself wondering what the reaction would be if the same exaggerated style were used to communicate non-conspiracy minded or “repent, sinner!” type messages.

So this project is sort of a social experiment as well as anything else I might be trying to do.

Here are some images of the work so far. These are not all the pictures available, you can see all the work to date as it evolves by following me on Instagram at instagram.com/thestudiolab. I’ll be documenting the work all year long as it evolves–I am hoping to change things on a weekly basis, if not more often than that as time permits…at the end of the year I will compile all the documentation into a book about the project. Do I dare keep a diary about this and including it in the book? Might be a good idea…